Bitext alignment: building and evaluating a bilingual corpus and translation memory of academic course descriptions

Following the internationalization of contemporary higher education, academic institutions based in non-English speaking countries are increasingly urged to produce contents in English to address international prospective students and personnel, as well as to increase their attractiveness. The demand for English translations in the institutional academic domain is consequently increasing at a rate exceeding the capacity of the translation profession. Resources for assisting non-native authors and translators in the production of appropriate texts in L2 are therefore required in order to help academic institutions and professionals streamline their translation workload. Some of these resources include: (i) parallel corpora to train machine translation systems and multilingual authoring tools; and (ii) translation memories for computer-aided tools. The purpose of this study is to create and evaluate reference resources like the ones mentioned in (i) and (ii) through the automatic sentence alignment of a large set of Italian and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) institutional academic texts given as equivalent but not necessarily parallel (i.e. translated). In this framework, a set of aligning algorithms and alignment tools is examined in order to identify the most profitable one(s) in terms of accuracy and time- and cost-effectiveness. In order to determine the text pairs to align, a sample is selected according to document length similarity (characters) and subsequently evaluated in terms of extent of noisiness/parallelism, alignment accuracy and content leverageability. The results of these analyses serve as the basis for the creation of an aligned bilingual corpus of academic course descriptions, which is eventually used to create a translation memory in TMX format.

La traduzione al servizio dell'internazionalizzazione: la localizzazione in cinese del sito web di Leonori S.r.l.

The participation in the Language Toolkit program—a joint initiative of the Department of Interpretation and Translation of Forlì (University of Bologna) and the Chamber of Commerce of Romagna—led to the creation of this dissertation. This program aims to support the internationalization of SMEs while also introducing near-graduates to a real professional context. The author collaborated on this project with Leonori, a company that produces and sells high jewelry products online and through retailers. The purpose of this collaboration is to translate and localize a part of the company website from Italian into Chinese, so as to facilitate their internationalization process to Chinese-speaking countries. This dissertation is organized according to the usual stages a translator goes through when carrying out a translation task. First and foremost, however, it was necessary to provide a theoretical background pertaining to the topics of the project. Specifically, the first chapter introduces the Language Toolkit program, the concept of internationalization and the company itself. The second chapter is dedicated to the topic of inverse translation, including the advantages and disadvantages of this practice. The third chapter highlights the main features of localization, with a particular emphasis on web localization. The fourth chapter deals with the analysis of the source text, according to the looping model developed by Nord (1991). The fifth chapter describes in detail the methods implemented for the creation of the language resources i.e., two comparable monolingual corpora and a termbase, which were built ad hoc for this specific project. In the sixth chapter all the translation strategies that were implemented are outlined, providing some examples from the source text. The final chapter describes the revision process, which occurred both during and after the translation phase.